Urbanisation and temporal change in land use with special reference to Bareilly city in Uttar Pradesh

Abstract

Urbanization has caused many impacts on natural resources associated with the reduction and conversion of green space. The land use pattern of a region is an outcome of natural and socio-economic factors and their utilization by man in time and space and has become a central component in current strategies for managing natural resources and monitoring environmental changes. Land Transformation is a process where changes in land use are observed at different time periods and is one of the important fields of human induced environmental transformation, with an extensive history dating back to antiquity. At present time, remote sensing and GIS are gaining importance as a vital tool for the analysis and integration of spatio-temporal data. The present study focuses on the land use changes in Bareilly City for about 10 years (2003-2012) by the comparison of two satellite images of different dates and other similar information of the intervening years for quantifying the magnitude of land use/land cover change.